The Blurgh

For the past few months, I’ve been almost solely working on the community outreach portion of my internship at CRR. Last week I got a glimpse at another side, vendor outreach, and it’s a completely different animal.

The community side is a lot of canvasing, petitioning, meeting with people–things that any community organizer would be very familiar with. I’m not sure what to classify the vendor side as…maybe non-profit development work, or sales? In the scheme of things, it really is a very important part of the business. It involves meeting with businesses and manufacturers in the area, and sometimes outside, to pitch the mission of CRR and secure good prices on whatever it is that they sell and/or make, which can be anything from lumber to solar cells.

According to the folks that I’ve been working with, since CRR started 15 years ago there’s been a huge upswing of vendor’s and suppliers in Southwestern PA, especially for the more high-tech components. In the beginning, people were telling stories about how they were traveling across the country for the latest and greatest stuff to come out, but now it seems that the development of new ideas has caught up with the research in our own neck of the woods.

Today I’m going with some other CRR folks to see a local biodiesel producer who’s been around for almost 2 decades now. They’re someone that we’ve worked with before, so everyone is anticipating a smooth meeting, but I’m still a little nervous. I actually had to bust out some nice clothes, too, which also involved me having to remember how to tie a tie!